New faces, and a way out

Susan was a strong councillor whose voice will be missed. Among the many things she did was sit as council's representative on the South Shore Regional Library Board, of which I am a member. I was always impressed by her knowledge of county affairs, and by her dedication to public libraries.

People who enter politics must, by nature, have thick skins. The reverse of winning a seat is losing a seat. Susan lost to Bruce by 89 votes, while Cameron Crowell - yet another good candidate - was 93 votes behind. There was a lot of interest in this particular race and the ultimate winner, Bruce Inglis, has good ideas he wants to bring to the table. We wish him luck.

It is a curious thing about the way we vote that the majority of voters did not choose the winner in this district. More than 56 per cent of the voters could be said not to have chosen Bruce, while the remainder did. It is a pattern that also held in many cases in the recent federal election, and it brought with it the usual calls for reform.

For instance, in the federal riding of South Shore-St. Margaret's, Gerald Keddy, Conservative, won the riding with 14,395 votes, or 36 per cent of the total. Gordon Earle, NDP, came second with 13,457 votes, or 34 per cent. Third was Bill Smith, Liberal, with 9,468 votes, or 24 per cent of the total. The Green's Michael Oddy got five per cent of the vote, and another one per cent went elsewhere.

What that means is that almost 64 per cent of the people in this riding did not get to see their choice as the eventual winner in South Shore-St. Margaret's. (I note here that I am making no judgments whatsoever on the quality of the five candidates in the riding).

The same held true across the country. The Conservatives stayed on as the governing party, winning 38 per cent of the vote. The Liberals won 26 per cent, the NDP 18 per cent, the Bloc Quebecois 10 per cent and the Greens seven per cent. That is to say, fully 60 per cent of the voters chose someone other than the party that won the election.

Because of the way we vote, the Conservative's 38 per cent translated into 47 per cent of the seats. The Liberal's 26 per cent brought 25 per cent of the seats; the NDP's 18 per cent brought 12 per cent of the seats, the Bloc's 10 per cent brought 16 per cent and the Green's seven per cent brought zero per cent of the seats.

I used to think that the first past the post system was acceptable because it brought stability to our politics. That only was true, however, when there were two main parties and a minor party or two. Lately, in Canada, the electorate has become quite fractured with two main parties, a very strong third party, a strong regional party, and minor parties picking up support.

And so the calls for reform. I don't like proportional representation, because it ends up with people being appointed to parliament to reflect the proportion of their party's vote. What may work better is something called instant runoff voting, where people vote on their ballot for their first, second and third choices.

If a candidate wins over 50 per cent of the vote, he or she is elected. If not, however, then the candidates with the fewest votes are dropped, the ballots are recounted, and when a person earns over 50 per cent of the recounted votes, he or she is the winner. Where it is used, people are much happier with the result, because how it works is that if your first choice is still in the running after the lowest are dropped, your vote still counts for that person. If your choice has been dropped, however, your second choice gets counted.

In a riding like ours, this system could easily have the same result as the first past the post system, but the beauty is that people would not feel frustrated, because either their first or second choice would have been elected.

The recounting would take additional time, of course, but that would be a small price to pay if the process were so much more democratic. And it would likely end the problems associated with successive minority governments.

Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com